Infinix HOT S Review; Compact, Beautiful and Special

If you are looking for a beautifully designed, perfectly spec’d compact phone, then the Infinix HOT S is your best bet. I have had it for close to 3 weeks now, and I wish to now share with you everything I have loved, and hated about it.

Everywhere people have praised this device to be very beautifully designed. And they are not lying. It is. Is it the best designed Infinix phone? I cannot conclude so because I so love the Infinix Note 3.

The Infinix HOT S feels like a really wonderful device to have. It catches people’s eyes. It is compact. It performs relatively well. And you can’t get tired of the cold metallic finish.

NB: I have attached camera samples, but they’ve been reduced in size for easier uploading.

Unboxing:

The boxing is relatively huge compared to what you get inside. You can check out the unboxing post here.

Specs:

Display 5.2 inches, 1280 x 720 pixels (424 PPI)

1.3GHz Octa-core Mediatek MT6753 Processor

2GB RAM

16GB internal storage

13MP back camera with dual LED Flash,

8MP front camera with flash

Android 6.0 Marshmallow with XOS

3000mAh battery

Supports 4G networks

Fingerprint scanner

Fingerprint:

I will start with this. This was the first Infinix phone to come with a fingerprint scanner. And at this time many people didn’t expect much from the scanners. But we were all wrong. The scanners are fast, really fast, and secure and must haves. There’s definitely no way the HOT S can exist without that scanner.

Display:

Being a 5.2 inch device with 720p display, you know you can’t have anything against it. It is bright when you need it to be. Outdoors though you’ll face issues trying to properly make out what’s on the screen.

The display size has been touted by some as being to small. It is a compact phone. And it is the perfect size and design. You need to touch it and use it to appreciate why it is as it is.

Design:

If you can try and find a way of getting the HOT S, you’ll see why everyone is praising the design. It is really really light. You can even forget it is in your pocket.

This thing can disappear easily, but you won’t get over that metallic finish.

Front Camera:

The front 8MP camera didn’t get to me as hyped or as I had expected. The front soft flash is bright and good for lowly lit areas. Outdoors the camera struggles to control the intake of light. You take a picture and you feel like there was too much light. Still, it captures nice pictures.

What I love most is that the fingerprint scanner acts up as your camera button when taking selfies. And to make this clear, you need not have registered you fingerprint to use this feature.

Back Camera:

The 13MP camera is good. Not stunning, or out-of-this-world good, but really good nonetheless. I feel like it does a good job both in low light areas and outdoors.

Sample 1:

Sample 2:

You be the judge. It doesn’t of course compare to the TECNO Camon C9‘s but when comparing it to the Infinix Note 3, shots look hard to pick out.

Magic Movie:

This is an app that comes with the phone and helps you quickly make beautiful videos. It does nothing much. I had expected an iMovie competitor. It not only falls short, it is thoroughly underwhelming for me.

All it does is apply some video filters over your videos without giving the power to actually edit videos. The filters can appear like something to make you happy at first. But over time you wonder where the app is actually headed to. And why you need to constantly test out 5 filters.

Performance

2GB RAM and that Octa core processor make it a relatively fast device. But not a perfect one. It has few lags sometimes.

These lags though won’t affect your overall interaction with the device.

XOS:

XOS is the best thing to happen to Infinix devices. Like I asked on the Infinix Note 3 review, Who needs a launcher anymore?

Battery:

The 3000mAh battery does a good job. You can get between 5 and 7hrs screen on time depending on whether you’re on 3G/4G or Wi-Fi and whether you’re doing something resource intensive or just watching videos.

Yes it will last a whole day, and part of the next day on normal fair use.

Finally

I say this is a compact phone because it is hard to feel that it is actually 5.2. One would easily conclude it is a 5.0 size phone. Plus it is very light.

It looks a lot like the Huawei GR3. But for a couple of reasons I’d pick it up over the GR3.

Dear Dickson,
Thanks for your beautiful review on infinix hot s, I bought mine about two months ago, but I beg to disagree with you and to say your review is somewhat exaggerated: Is the memory expandable? My phone disagrees with you on this. Yes there exist a slot for SD card but it does not recognise of accept an SD card. In an infinix shop at Asaba, Delta State (Nigeria) engineers failed to expand the memory and reluctantly concluded it was a factory error. The consequence of not expanding the memory is clear: system update not possible. Second point of disappointment with the much praised infinix hot s : battery not removable. Since the misfortune of buying this useless phone, the screen has frozen the third time, and each it took hour to defroze , such an embarrassment would have been solved by removing the battery… Worse of all the shop refused to take it back…warranty my foot!